Anaheim’s Folly: the Indoor Arena : What If It Built a Facility and Nobody Came?

There’s still nothing doing at the new Anaheim indoor arena, a beautiful facility standing on the horizon of sprawling freeways.

But it casts a shadow of impending debt over the city. It’s like a blimp lingering above the stadium after some ballyhooed sporting event was canceled for lack of interest.

The festive toasts for the groundbreaking are distant history. It became clear weeks ago that no professional basketball franchise would be on hand for the opening next year. Now the prospect for a hockey team anytime soon has passed the city by too.

The math on that double disappointment is easy enough to do. One plus one equals $2.5 million. That’s what the city now is liable for annually under its agreement with Ogden Corp. and the Nederlander Organization, its partners in the arena project.

The developer will get money anyway and the city will not get basketball or hockey anytime soon. That about sums it up. It is now apparent that Anaheim took pains all along to look out for everybody but itself.

The City Council was so eager to charge ahead in 1990 that it voted 4 to 1 to pay $3.2 million from its general tax fund for land near the arena that had been assessed at only $1.4 million. At the time, the city cited “goodwill” value over and above tangible assets at the location.

That was the same spirit of good intention, no doubt, that led the city to guard the financial interests of Ogden by awarding it a concessions contract at nearby Anaheim Stadium as a kind of advance booby prize. And what consolation it provided. The concessions for the Rams’ and Angels’ venue are among the most lucrative in sports, worth millions annually.

The broad hint was there, of course, that even the key players had reservations about a project that seemed dicey from the start. Certainly the developer was apprehensive enough to cut a wider deal in the absence of any sure thing on the coming sports franchises.

But accommodating Anaheim told itself and others that if you build an arena, they will come. It was so eager to win a reckless race with Santa Ana to be the first city in Orange County with a new facility that it pulled out all the stops. A three-way land swap with a private development company in 1989, fueled by generous campaign contributions to various City Council members, put the city on course for its race to nowhere. “This afternoon is the beginning of the Anaheim Arena,” Mayor Fred Hunter proclaimed. The mayor and council denied the campaign contributions had much to do with anything.

At the same time, the fast-tracking city actually was constructing a bargaining chip for whatever restless franchises there were in the far-flung sports capitals of the United States and Canada. The lure of a move West provided hockey teams in other cities--Bloomington, Ind., Hartford, Conn., and Winnipeg, Canada--with ammunition to negotiate better agreements from their host cities or states, and stay put. Some of them did just that. Hockey fans in Connecticut thank you, taxpayers of Anaheim, for your part in keeping their Whalers put.

Meanwhile, the city, with its financial obligation, has Ogden scouting talent in the hope that some miracle will get it off the hook. “There are still a number of teams we’re talking to,” says Brad Mayne, general manager of the arena.

The search grows grim. Southern California remains in recession. Anaheim looks ever more desperately for the names of the players to fill out its empty lineup cards.